


the light dappled through glass

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Autistic Frisk, Borderline Personality Disorder, Dependent personality disorder, Gen, Nonverbal Frisk, Post-Canon, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 12:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13501472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: On a rainy afternoon, Frisk and Asgore make strawberry jam.





	the light dappled through glass

**Author's Note:**

> _(Is it too late to tell you that I don’t mind?_ – if you find the way the light falls through your window and onto your bedroom wall pretty, [write about it](https://marchenwings.tumblr.com/post/168057133684/). call it soft and golden as sunlit honey.)
> 
> the jam recipe used here was adapted from the one on wikihow.

It rained earlier—it is still raining now, but it has tapered; the rain before came down in sheets of water, the sort of force and volume that makes it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of you, the sort where wind sends veils of droplets in spirals through the air. The whole world turned silver outside the windows, and rattled over the roof and across the porch as noisily as hail.

Torn leaves and grass still litter the outside, but between the droplets still clinging to the windowpanes light streams through. It is still raining, but thinly, glittering strings of water dropping out of patchy clouds and a blue sky. The view reminds you of ropes of clear glass beads hung over a doorway in place of a door, something you saw in an old movie.

The light hits the rows of glass jars drip-drying in rows on the counter, and filters through to make ghostly semicircles and splashes of rainbow over the checks of the washcloth. They’re special jars just for canning, Asgore told you while he was boiling them to sterilize them.

It’s just the two of you in the kitchen. Chara was watching the rain on the couch and now they’re sleeping there—not that they would have come to help you anyway, they have zero desire to learn to cook. Asriel decided to stay at Toriel’s for the day—they’re going to go clothes shopping, and neither you nor Chara felt at all up to braving crowds and gendered kids’ clothes sections, so you’re getting to stay and have Asgore watch you instead.

So in all practical senses, today is a day just for you and your foster father, and the ingredients spread across the table: Several pints of freshly washed strawberries, cans of pectin and sugar, a bottle of lemon juice, margarine; one whole lemon, a pepper grinder loaded with newly bought peppercorns, and a bottle of vanilla beans.

Mt. Ebott stands verdant in the window frame, almost like a still photo or a painting.

Asgore turns from it to smile down at you. He’s had his sleeves rolled up and buttoned at his elbows for at least twenty minutes now, even though you were waiting on the jars drying.

“Well,” he says, “are you ready?”

You nod enthusiastically to him.

 

 

There are some things that your heart understands faster than your head does.

It didn’t surprise you to learn that Papyrus is autistic just like you because you figured it out intuitively on some deeper level from the first day that you met him, recognized his own behavior in yourself. Learning the real circumstances behind Chara’s death in New Home and in Alphys’ real lab didn’t shock you either; you knew Chara almost as well as you knew yourself by then. You knew how they tended to look at a problem, their pragmatic worldview and how little they would value themself when weighed against both love and a goal. Oh, yes, you remember yourself thinking; yes, this is something that Chara would do.

But sometimes it takes your head a lot longer to catch up to your heart.

 

 

For your twelfth birthday, Asgore got you your own set of cookware—high-quality sets of bowls and utensils that are made of top-class alloys but are the bright solid colors of kid’s toys. Only the cool feel of them under your fingers and the sharpness of the knives tell you that these are real tools for grown-up use. You’re not allowed to use them without his supervision by decree of Toriel, on account of you and Chara not being trusted around knives; you have no idea where he puts them when you’re not cooking together. Maybe he literally hides them with magic.

Whatever the case, your set is laid out on your side of the table, and Asgore’s set—plain steel, much bigger so that he’ll have an easier time holding and using it with his great big hands—is laid out on his.

“First we will need to cut up all of the strawberries,” he says, “and set them up separately in each of the different bowls. We will be cutting them in halves, and removing the leaves.” He hesitates here, looking at you with something like concern in his eyes. “Would you like to take half and half? You can think of it as a race if you would like, but you must be very careful and not hurt yourself.”

You give him two cheerful thumbs up, and he smiles at you. You pull two of the large bowls towards yourself, and he sets half of the strawberries in front of you.

“Are you all ready?” he asks as he reaches for the other strawberries. “You may take a head start if you like, Frisk.”

You shake your head. _I think it’s more fun if we start at the same time,_ you say. _It’s more fair, and I think it’s nice to just work at the same pace together._

Asgore’s eyes widen a little, and then he smiles. “You’re very right. That does sound nice.”

So you get to work, in silence but for the gentle thunk of knife blades hitting the cutting boards and the plops as halves of strawberry drop into the mixing bowls. It’s harder for you to speak with your hands occupied; if Asgore wanted to keep up the conversation he could, but it would slow you down, so he doesn’t.

Even so, and even despite that the tiny berries must be extra difficult for him to handle with his great big fingers, he’s already halfway into filling his second bowl when you finish your first.

Toriel would lecture you strictly if this were one of your pie days and she caught you sneaking nibbles of fruits she wanted to use as fillings, but when you pop one of the strawberries into your mouth after cutting out the leaves instead of chopping it and putting it in the bowl, Asgore merely smiles and says “Now, do not eat _too_ many” and goes back to his own work.

If you spent the rest of the day just like this you don’t think you could be happier.

 

 

You love Toriel with all your heart, with every drop of determination in your soul. She took you in, even after everything, still wanted you even when she’d gotten her _real_ son back. She provides for you and thinks of you and pays attention to you and is gentle and kind with you, and she never gets angry at you for anything unreasonable.

So it took a while for awareness to dawn that being around Asgore is comfortable on a level that not even Toriel can match. But it _is_ comfortable, and once you had noticed that and realized that it didn’t surprise you, once you started trying to figure out why, you hit on what kind of comfortable it is.

Being around Asgore is _relaxing._ When you’re around most of your other friends, there’s always a vague tension underneath whatever else you’re feeling, a sense that you have to be ready to try to please them, a knowledge that they might at any time push you into things.

Maybe _push_ is too mean a way to put it. You don’t think that any of them know they do it, actually. It’s just that sometimes they’re so excited about something or they want you to do something so much that you feel pressured to go along even if you don’t actually want to. Chara is different—they spent long enough conjoined to your soul that they _know_ you have trouble asserting yourself, and sometimes you can feel them holding back or see them hesitate for a split second to phrase something differently so that you won’t feel obligated.

The thing about Asgore is that even though _he’s_ never been in your head or anything, he never pushes you either.

 

 

“We will crush the fruit for about a minute and a half,” Asgore explains, getting out an old-fashioned timer. “Crushing it for longer would make the jam softer, but as you and Chara both prefer it with larger chunks of fruit, this should be sufficient.”

You’ve never actually gotten to use the potato masher in your cooking set before, so you bounce a little on your heels as you pick it up. It’s a bright and cheerful robin’s egg blue that will show strawberry juice very clearly, which will be convenient later when you’re cleaning up. Asgore likes to wash his tools by hand, saying that he enjoys showing respect and care for each one, and you think that sounds so nice that you always try to do the same.

“All right, go ahead,” Asgore says, setting the ticking timer down on the table.

These strawberries are still pretty fresh, so they don’t squish down immediately when you push on them with the masher. It reminds you a little of making tomato sauce with Undyne and her telling you to stop petting the enemy, so you sneak a surreptitious glance at Asgore to make sure you’re using the right amount of strength.

Your foster father’s gaze is trained on the bowl in front of him, and his movements are almost delicate as he manipulates his own potato masher. The broad tip of his tongue is even sticking out a little, like a big cat, and it’s sort of weirdly cute. You duck your head and focus on your bowl of strawberries again so that your hair will fall over the side of your face and hide your smile.

“That is very good,” Asgore says once the timer is up, reaching out one hand to pat you on the back. “This will definitely turn out to be delicious! The next step is to add the various ingredients together in the pots, and stir to mix them. For the lemon and vanilla jams we can add the secret ingredients now, as well.”

He helps you tip your two bowls of fruit into the tall pots before moving on to his own.

“Each of these will need a quarter cup of lemon juice,” he says, “as well as half a tablespoon of margarine. Take one of the vanilla beans and cut it in half, and put both halves into one of the pots—we will take out the beans when it is time to can the finished jam; boiling it together with the fruit will give it all a nice vanilla taste. I will take care of grating the lemon zest into one of the pots I shall be stirring. And while we stir them, we will add a packet of pectin to each one.”

 _Are we going to boil them all at once?_ you ask, frowning. _Won’t that be a little hard…?_

Asgore shakes his head. “I am very used to doing large batches of jam like this. If you prefer to only stir one of the pots since you are new, I can handle three, or if you would like to try to look after two, you may. If you run into trouble I will be able to help you, either way.”

You lean to one side just a little. Since Asgore has given you plenty of options and never indicated his own feelings about any of them, you’re left to your own devices to pick. _I think… maybe I want to try out stirring them both just in case?_ you venture. _But I’m worried about it being too hard, and burning the jam, so…_

“It is all right,” Asgore tells you, and smiles. The corners of his eyes crinkle, and make the golden color of the irises look sunnier than usual. “If you would like to try, then by all means you may try. Trying is a good thing. As I said, I will be here to help you, and it is not the end of the world if things do not work out, after all. At the very least you will be able to learn a lot for the next time you want to try.”

Hold on and keep trying is an instruction you’re familiar with, and it’s one you are—at least according to your friends—good at. So you nod and smile a little. _Okay._

 

 

Asriel, who is probably the biggest mama’s boy you know, still rejoices every time the three of you go to stay at Asgore’s. Part of it is genuinely that he likes being able to hang out with his dad sometimes, but he readily admitted to you that he has ulterior motives too.

“I mean, Dad doesn’t say no to everything like Mom does,” he said back when you first talked about it, pausing in brushing his fur and turning away from the mirror to look at you. He grinned and lowered his voice: “Plus even when we’re grounded and stuff and we’re not supposed to watch TV or play games, Dad always caves and lets us do it like _right away._ He doesn’t even get mad when Chara says swears.”

Then he had you help him fix the sparkly barette to the fur over his ear, because that was when Asriel was first getting into human hair accessories and you didn’t have any that were really made to work well with short monster fur.

“Asgore and Toriel used to do the good cop bad cop act on us a lot, sort of like when Toriel fired Alphys,” Chara told you later. “That was just how they were used to parenting, I guess. Toriel would get mad and punish you, and Asgore would win you over with sympathy and convince you to not act out anymore. Well—I guess that part works better on us than it does on Asriel.”

They spread their hands at you like _what are you gonna do,_ and you giggled a little, making them smile.

“I like it about him, that he’s less strict and that it’s easier to get your way with him. Toriel can be hard to persuade once she’s dug her heels in, and if she decides she doesn’t care what your point of view is, you’ll never get her to see from it. Though, she has gotten more lenient than she used to be. Either because she’s glad to have us back or because she knows she can’t do good cop bad cop by herself.

“I do think that Asriel overdoes it sometimes with all the… taking advantage of Asgore being a pushover to get whatever he wants.”

 _You do it too, though,_ you pointed out.

“Only if it’s something that’s _that_ important,” Chara retorted, looking away briefly. “If we take it for granted that Asgore will spoil us forever, get cocky, and overdo it, either he or Toriel will wise up and put a stop to it somehow. Besides, with Asgore it feels a little… mean to walk all over him all the time, so I want to at least try to have restraint.”

 _Mean,_ you repeated.

Chara nodded and looked you directly in the eyes for just a moment. “Plus, if I didn’t hold back, I know that you wouldn’t like it.”

 

 

Within about thirty seconds of trying to stir with both hands, you get the sinking feeling that you have definitely without a doubt bitten off more than you can chew: Your arms want to move in sync but your right arm is stronger than your left, faster, and the two pots of jam aren’t boiling uniformly.

Any second now you’re sure you’ll hear the hiss of fruit burning, and it churns and crackles in your gut, so you say “Dad?” out loud, more plaintive than you meant to.

“Here, it is all right,” says Asgore from beside you, and he takes the wooden spoon as soon as you release it.

You can only really look in little peeks and glimpses—you don’t want to take your eyes off your one remaining pot for too long, just in case—but his motions are very smooth as he shifts from one pot to the next, broad strong strokes, like a butterfly landing and then taking off in the next moment. The boiling jam doesn’t have time to settle and start to burn.

“As soon as it continues to bubble even while you stir it,” Asgore says, “then it is time to add in the sugar. Do not turn the heat down until you have stirred it in completely. I think we shall start with your pot, and then if you would like to you may help me pour sugar into the rest in turn.”

Each of these pots requires four full cups of sugar. You have two measuring cups on the counter beside you, the tiny grains glittering like fresh snow in the light from the window, feathers of raindrop caustics glimmering over the tiny sugar dunes.

You need your right hand for mixing, so you try reaching under your arm and then over it to grab the first measuring cup. In the end you just wind up dumping the whole thing in all at once, clumsy and inelegant; you cringe a little at the clunk as you put the empty cup back down and then redirect your attention to the jam, gripping the spoon with both hands as you stir the sugar in. It seems to melt into the sticky juicy mass of squishy fruit, and the colors of the fruit seem to get brighter and more candylike as you do.

The second cup of sugar at least goes a little bit more skillfully. The jam gets even brighter in color as you continue to stir.

“That should just about do it,” Asgore says, startling you a little. “Now you can turn the heat almost all the way down—all that is left to do is simmer this mixture for about ten minutes.”

You follow his instructions and step back from the pot, sighing.

He’s still concentrating on the other three pots, swapping back and forth between a few stirs each, and you can’t really ask him to turn to face you so that you can sign. Instead you take a breath and venture timidly, aloud, “Can I… help with the sugar with the rest?”

Asgore doesn’t startle and make you feel bad for suddenly calling out to him. “Of course you may,” he says smoothly. “That would be a great help.”

You refill the two measuring cups with the same amount of sugar, and take back over the pot that you had to have him manage. When you give it a few experimental stirs before pouring the sugar, you find that its consistency is no different from the jam you handled by yourself.

 

 

Asgore doesn’t say _no_ to people often.

When he does, or when he expresses disapproval of something—like when he tries to get Asriel to stop causing trouble with bad pranks, or to discourage Chara from eating too much chocolate before dinner—he doesn’t really reinforce it. If the other person really pushes, his _no_ gets softer and softer until it turns into more of a _do as you will._ In general, he doesn’t put his foot down; his reputation amongst the monsters as a big fuzzy pushover is well-deserved.

There are exceptions to this. The firmest you’ve _ever_ seen Asgore act about anything was when he insisted on fighting you back in the underground, before you reloaded from your old SAVE and went to go get closer to Alphys based on Asriel (then Flowey)’s hinting. Back then you’d fallen all over yourself begging him to lay down his weapon, and he’d been visibly reluctant to fight you, his attacks becoming more and more halfhearted. But he still hadn’t stopped.

And whenever Toriel makes her opinion clear on something, he always adheres to it. Chara’s right that Asriel will be in big trouble if Toriel ever catches wind of his overriding his father’s weak will to do as he pleases; if she snaps at Asgore about it, he’s bound to become a whole lot more severe about punishments in general. There’s the matter of your cookware too—at first Asgore wanted you to be able to take it with you so that you could use it while cooking with your foster mother too, but Toriel decided it wasn’t safe to let you keep the knives, and so Asgore diligently takes and hides them whenever he won’t be supervising you.

Maybe it’s just because it’s Toriel, and Asgore regrets going against her wishes and declaring war on humans a hundred years ago. You don’t know enough about what they were like before; Chara doesn’t like to talk about it, and even Asriel gets sad about his parents’ estrangement if you get too nosy.

But maybe Asgore is just… like this, and always has been.

You could never be a hundred percent sure without asking directly, but… you have a very strong hunch that it’s the latter.

 

 

The two of you skim the foam off the top of the jam in cold spoons, blow on it, and eat it. The fresh-made jam is delicious, less sweet than you’re used to, but so hot you burn the inside of your mouth and have to stop to pant a little. Across from you Asgore is sticking out his tongue with a grimace. You catch each other’s eye, and you start smiling at the same time he begins to chuckle.

Asgore grinds the fresh pepper and sprinkles a generous amount into the pot of jam that he didn’t grate lemon zest into while you watch.

“The plain jam will go into the pink jars,” he says, slow and easy; “the vanilla into the blue jars, the lemon into the yellow ones, and the pepper into the green. All that is left is to ladle them into the right ones, seal them, and boil them again.”

You nod. Asgore helps you get the pink and blue jars and the two pots of jam; you get out your bright lavender ladle and begin to get the plain jam put away. Asgore’s jars have convenient marks along the outsides to show you where to fill to.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stir both,” you say, not looking at Asgore.

“Oh!” he says. “It is all right.”

“I think… I can do it better next time, though. If… if I can still try.”

“Of course you may,” he tells you, gentle, warm.

You probably wouldn’t assert this if it were anyone else. You probably wouldn’t even try again, if it were anyone else, unless they impressed on you that you should or they wanted you to. But Asgore won’t push you, and he won’t show disapproval, so you feel safer being this assertive than you would amongst most of your other friends.

Once you’ve got the seals on all the jars for the plain jam, Asgore passes you tongs so that you can pick the two halves of the vanilla bean out of the other pot.

Now that the jam is no longer bubbling on the stove, the only noise is the tiny clinks you and Asgore make against the pots and jars with your ladles, and the intermittent patter of the rain from outside.

 

 

You still need to talk to everyone about how pressured you always feel to please them, about how much influence they really have over you. At least that’s what your therapist keeps telling you, and you’re working on it. This is an easier task in some cases than in others.

But for now—it takes someone who already has trouble enforcing their own boundaries to be as careful of yours as you need, given that you don’t speak up about them. It takes someone who can’t tell people no to avoid pressuring you into saying yes. It takes someone as anxious to make people happy as you are to make you relax and not worry about needing to do so.

So you feel safe, here, in the light and rain, with Chara who knows and Asgore who intuits.

You can relax, here.

 

 

Through the window you can see the clouds darkening again, and fat plops begin to rattle once more on the roof.

“Goodness,” Asgore comments as you pack the rest of the jars into the canner. “I am glad that we were able to get most of the work done while we still had the light.”

You smile and nod along.

There’s a faint groan from the living room; you and Asgore both raise your heads to see that Chara is sitting up on the sofa, blinking around groggily with their hair sticking up in the back.

“Smells like,” they say scratchily, interrupting themself to yawn, “lots of strawberry.”

“We still have just enough of the fresh jam left in the large pots to have a taste while the cans are boiling,” Asgore says, beaming. “Frisk, I believe that we have a small amount of matzah left that we could put the jam on?”

You nod eagerly and trot off to the pantry to fish out the box.

 

 

The jam is less sweet freshly made than it will be when you eat it from the cans later, but this milder flavor is a special one that you can only have on the day you cook it.

“This came out good,” Chara says, licking jam off their fingers, and you and Asgore look at each other and beam.

The timer goes off in the kitchen, quiet against the rainfall, light reflecting through the trails of water on the windowpanes.


End file.
